On the same day whistleblower Frances Haugen was testifying before Congress about the harms of Facebook and Instagram to children in the fall of 2021, a former engineering director at the social media giant who had rejoined the company as a consultant sent an alarming email to Mark Zuckerberg about the same topic.
Arturo Béjar, known for his expertise on curbing online harassment, recounted to the Meta CEO of his own daughter’s troubling experiences with Instagram. But he said his concerns and warnings went unheeded. And on Tuesday, it was Béjar’s turn to testify to Congress.
“I appear before you today as a dad with first-hand experience of a child who received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram,” he told a panel of US senators.
Béjar worked as an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, attracting wide attention for his work to combat cyberbullying. He thought things were getting better. But between leaving the company and returning in 2019 as a contractor, Béjar’s own daughter had started using Instagram.
“She and her friends began having awful experiences, including repeated unwanted sexual advances, harassment,” he testified on Tuesday. “She reported these incidents to the company and it did nothing.”
In the 2021 note, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Béjar outlined a “critical gap” between how the company approached harm and how the people who use its products – most notably young people – experience it.
“Two weeks ago my daughter, 16, and an experimenting creator on Instagram, made a post about cars, and someone commented ‘Get back to the kitchen.’ It was deeply upsetting to her,” he wrote. “At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating, and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny. I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.”
Béjar testified before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday about social media and the teen mental health crisis, hoping to shed light on how Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, knew about the harms Instagram was causing but chose not to make mea
